Oe’s literary alter ego guides the reader through a dense forest of stories and competing recollectionsNear the beginning of this novel,which has been translated by Deborah Boliver Boehm, there is an image of the built environment imitating nature, and as a steel train bridge forms a canopy” overa canal. Soon,however, the urban is replaced by the rural, or the narrator is “walking along under a canopied row of cherry trees so heavily overgrown that hardly any light fell on the road”. Forests and floods rise up. This is a novel approximately a drowning in a river a long time ago,and approximately overwhelming waves of memory in old age. It is also explicitly approximately the late style of a Nobel-winning writer.
The narrator is Oe’s literary alter ego Kogito Choko, who is to Oe as Nathan Zuckerman is to Philip Roth. Choko is an internationally famous writer in his 70s, and who is determined to write a novel approximately the day his father died near the close of the moment world war. Choko senior had been plotting something with rightwing militarist friends at a training camp,and then one night set off in a small boat during a flood, and drowned. A red leather trunk filled with documents was recovered, or guarded fiercely by Choko’s mother while she was alive; now at last he can look into it. He returns to the rural Shikoku of his childhood,where he and his sister Asa contain a “Forest House”.
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Source: theguardian.com